


A Love Song

by LadySokolov



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble, Fluff, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-05
Updated: 2013-06-05
Packaged: 2017-12-14 01:11:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySokolov/pseuds/LadySokolov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sokolov can't find a song that fits his relationship with Piero. Random drabble. Post game. Low chaos ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Love Song

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks go to my friend Pokestine for beta-ing.

He can’t find a love song about his relationship with Piero. 

No minstrels or courtesans sing of the shared sense of triumph that comes whenever they make a breakthrough, or of how fiercely his heart burns when they debate something as irrelevant as the classification of different varieties of river krust with such extended passion that soon they have no choice but to fall into bed together as one single writhing mass of desperation, clashing teeth and far too much clothing. He often curses Piero for that. Why must he insist on wearing so much blasted clothing?

The love songs he does hear always seem to go on about their paramour’s more physical attributes. He has heard many a sweet word sung about broad, handsome shoulders, or curvaceous hips and dainty hands, has listened to tones of skin be compared to milk or bronze, and heard men claim their lovers had the sweetest laugh or softest whisper in the world. In his experience the writers of love songs also seemed to have a particular fondness for eyes that reminded them of starlight or precious gems.

Piero is skinnier than is really healthy, and bony in all the wrong places, and Sokolov has told him several times that he should stop skipping meals. His voice cracks if he raises it much above a murmur, and his skin is pale in a way that makes Sokolov think they might occasionally need to get out of the laboratory more often, and certainly doesn't remind him of milk or moonlight. 

There are in fact not many parts of Piero’s physical body that Sokolov would call beautiful, least of all his eyes, which are watery and prone to redness and squinting after long nights of reading by lamplight, and yet occasionally he’ll still find himself drowning in them, or smiling whenever they meet his own across the laboratory.

He wonders if anyone looks at the two of them together and realises they are, for want of a better description, a couple. He feels like there should be another way to define them. Research colleagues that occasionally have sex, and argue a lot, but who work just fine around one another and have become quite inseparable and who actually really care for one another but who aren't really lovers, not in the traditional sense of the word, at least, is just too long. They do not hold hands, and neither of them are particularly fond of dancing, or of long moonlit walks, and there was never any giving of flowers or courting of any sort really. Sokolov will guiltily admit that they might, just occasionally, fall asleep in each other’s arms, but even kissing is mostly reserved for those times when there had been, or was likely soon to be, a grand shedding of clothes followed by activities a lot more intimate than mere kissing.

Sometimes he wonders whether he’s judged wrong, and this thing between the two of them is not love at all. Then he’ll scoff at his own thoughts and dismiss them for the nonsense they are, for what else could it be? 

He has never cared for someone this much, and it terrifies him. He would never admit to either emotion though, especially not to Piero, even when they are both drunk and tired and Sokolov finds himself listening to Piero ramble on for hours about an impossible invention he has imagined, and Sokolov feels his heart swell with a level of fondness that he tries to convince himself is not there. 

He’s in love. It’s not the sort of love that they sing about it songs, or write about in romance novels, and if someone had told him a year ago that he would come to love Piero Joplin then he would have laughed in their face, or worse.

In truth, there is no love song that describes their relationship, and so they work in relative silence, broken not by music, but by long debates or discussions that very few except themselves would find interesting.

Sokolov wonders if he should write a love song to fill the gap himself, but he’s not sure that he has the proper grasp of musical theory necessary for such a feat, and so he paints Piero instead, in what he sees as a kind but honest manner, a delicate balance which he tries to achieve in most of his paintings, and which he thinks he has finally perfected with this one. 

When he presents the painting to his partner Piero thanks him politely, and then gets back to the test subject he had been examining. Piero had never had much of an interest in the visual arts, a fact which Sokolov had known, but the painting had been more for himself than for Piero anyway, and before long he frames it and hangs it on one wall of the laboratory, as far away from potential chemical spills and blood splatter as possible.

Now, whenever someone visits them in the laboratory the visitor spends a few seconds staring at the new painting. Piero does not look particularly striking in it, and Sokolov did not use bright colours, knowing they would make the subject look washed out in comparison, but there is something about it which draws the eye nonetheless.

The viewer will inevitably turn their head this way and that, as though there is something about the painting that is not fully comprehensible, at least at first, and then, as they read the small plaque bearing the painting’s title which has been placed beneath the portrait their eyes light up, and more often than not they smile to themselves, or, in the case of a certain young Empress who found the whole situation far more delightful than Sokolov felt she should have, rush over to Sokolov grinning from ear to ear and congratulate him. 

He had named the painting ‘A Love Song.’


End file.
